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Senior Living Marketing Tips: What is Your Special Sauce?

Marketing Strategies for Senior Living: What’s Your Special Sauce?

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Let’s talk awesome marketing strategies for senior living. To start, who remembers that great jingle from the 1970’s: “Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun”?

For all of us who grew up with that catchy song, we knew it was about the McDonald’s Big Mac. The special sauce was the magic. It was the distinction between a plain old hamburger and a Big Mac.

OK, so what’s this got to do with your senior living community?

Keep reading…

When it comes to marketing strategies for senior living, you must know your community’s special sauce.

Special sauce is a good way to explain how you’re different from your competitors. In other words, your special sauce is what sets you apart.

For example, consider Walmart. Its special sauce is simple: pricing. Everything that Walmart does is specifically about keeping their prices low. Apple’s special sauce is innovation. Nike focuses on their product line. They are the gold standard in athletic wear.

What’s the special sauce in your senior living community? Do you have something that makes your community stand out?

Not sure? Not to worry. The following marketing strategies for senior living will help you create the perfect special sauce recipe for your community.

1. Operational Excellence

Offering quality services at an affordable price—that’s what everyone wants, right? A great example is our friend McDonald’s. It offers a simple, budget-friendly menu. It also maintains consistency in taste, swift service, and efficiency.

2. Product Leadership

This competitive strategy focuses on bringing superior products to the market. Also, the products should ultimately create great experiences for customers. Consider this from a senior living marketing perspective. For example, is your wellness program outstanding? Do you offer a unique dining experience? Talk about them!

3. Service Quality

Delivering consistently superior customer service is the recipe for this special sauce. The secret ingredient? Service resolution. After all, nobody’s perfect. But being able to listen to the customers’ problems so you can work toward a positive resolution is key. Virgin Airlines is a great example of a company that offers full service flights and outstanding customer service.

4. Relationship Differentiation

This special sauce is all about your associates and team members. Their interactions with the customer demonstrate competence, courtesy, credibility, reliability, and responsiveness. This avenue is closely related to service quality. But where service quality mostly focuses on processes and systems, relationship differentiation is all about the people.

The hiring process at Zappos is a great example of how they maintain their relationship differentiation. The recruitment process is like a courtship. They woo people who fit into their culture and who are good people.

5. Reputation Differentiation

Some companies set themselves apart by their reputation. This can be difficult for newer senior living communities, but even they can succeed in establishing a quality reputation through strategic partnerships. In other words, alliances with hospitals, medical staff, and industry thought leaders can establish a company as an expert.

DuPont, for example, has a strong reputation, employing engineers, scientists, and sales reps with solid technical or educational backgrounds.

To help you define your special sauce, ask yourself the following questions:

  1. Why do your customers choose you rather than your competitors?
  2. What emotional need does your service fulfill?
  3. What aspects of your business can your competitors not imitate?

Once you’ve determined your special sauce, make sure that you do the following.

  • First, your special sauce isn’t something you simply throw around in senior living marketing copy. Your company should be walking the talk when it comes to fulfillment.
  • Second, employees should be able to articulate your special sauce.
  • Third, make sure your special sauce is part of your culture at all levels.
  • Finally, make sure you promote how great your special sauce is across all marketing channels!

Need help defining your community’s special sauce! Our senior living marketing agency can help!

We have decades of industry experience, so we know how to create a special sauce that will be unique to your community. Let us help!

sales tools

Putting the Right Tools in Your Sales Toolbox

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It is always tricky creating the right Sales Toolbox – one that creates urgency without eroding revenue.  Used correctly, incentives can be used to shorten the sales cycle and achieve move-in targets but they can also be overused leaving money on the table.  Choosing the tools that are right for the job of occupancy & revenue growth requires good analysis and the flexibility to make changes as occupancy fluctuates.  Here are a few things to consider:

Customize the Toolbox for the Size of the Job

Different tools are needed to boost occupancy by 20% than by 5 % so create different toolboxes for communities at various levels of vacancy.  This can be accomplished by simply using the same incentives but with different values (dollar amounts or percentages) or by sweetening the incentives when the occupancy drops to a certain level.  For example, communities above 90% occupancy may be able to offer a variety of incentives up to a certain dollar amount (reimburse moving costs, apartment upgrades, etc.) or use discount percentage (discount community fee by x%, etc.) but if occupancy drops below 90% the dollar amounts and percentages increase.

Short Term vs. Long Term incentives

Some incentives are short term as the incentive is applied once, usually upfront, and other incentives are applied on an ongoing basis.  This is where the revenue vs. occupancy growth must be considered and balanced.  Waiving or discounting a month’s rent or community fee is a short term incentive that erodes revenue for only the month the incentive is applied; discounting rent or offering rent locks erodes revenue over a longer period of time.   Operators and sales leaders have to work together to determine what the goals are in order to create the right toolbox.

Inspect, Analyze and Adjust

There are certain trends to look at in creating the right toolbox.  The first is the average length of stay by lifestyle (IL, AL, ALZ), which helps to project the impact of long-term incentives.  There is a difference in offering a two-year rate lock when the average length of stay is 18 months then when it is 48 months.   Also, the average rate per unit by type of your current residents is helpful to consider ensuring that new residents are not paying less on average than your residents who have lived in the community for years.  Once the sales toolbox is created and approved, an approval process must be established for transparency and to track the success of each incentive offered.  If families show no interest in one of the offers, change it up!

Best Practices

Here is what I have learned in building sales toolboxes over the years:

  • Have a sales toolbox for the Sales Team and another one for the Executive Directors.  I like to give the sales team the short-term incentives and empower them to use the toolbox to shorten the sales cycle and reserve any incentive that impacts ongoing revenue in the hands of the Executive Director.
  • Get feedback from the community and regional teams while creating the toolbox and be willing to adjust the incentives based on individual market differences.  Everyone likes to be part of the process and collaboration increases buy-in.
  • Make sure there are good systems to track the impact of the incentives.  Knowing the historical move-in numbers, market rates and actual collected rates will help evaluate the impact of the program.  The purpose of a sales toolbox is to increase the move-in volume by empowering community teams to overcome objections and shorten the sales cycle.  In six months the trend should show a correlation of incentive dollars relating to increased move-in volume.
  • Evaluate which incentives are working as it may reveal an underlying issue that can be addressed.  For example, if most families are choosing a 5% rent reduction, you may have a pricing issue or if they are choosing an apartment upgrade (a studio deluxe for the same price as a standard studio), you may have a barrier based on the size of your apartments.

Are there any other tools you would add to your sales toolbox? Let’s Chat